What Your Employees Want – Day Five

How can you salvage and rebuild your team that includes people are who using company time to actively look for another job? Today we discuss a strategy to address this issue.

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Transcript

Good day and welcome to the leading with nice daily. My name is Mathieu Yuill, and this week we’ve been looking at the question, do you know what your employees really want? And it’s Friday, so we’re going to try to wrap it up today, but this could easily be an entire, flash briefing or a podcast on its own. I want to challenge you to do something in 2020 and if not at least 2021 the first two quarters, what I’d love for you to do is close the doors to your business for the day and give your employees the day off. Why would you do that? Cause that’s crazy. We’re going to lose so much money because often we hear this phrase, Oh our employees, our number one asset, they’re the best. We love our employees, we have the best. If you have the best, this is a great way to show it to them to shut the doors.

Now I’d recommend you do it as part of a strategy of saying thank you for working hard on a particular thing. Maybe your organization rents a conference. Maybe your organization has a very busy season. Maybe there is a time when it’s an all hands on deck situation and about a month after that or three weeks after that, close your doors. There’s two companies that I’ve known to do this with great success. One was based out of Colorado. They actually did not do client facing work on Fridays. So they’re an agency and you could not talk to them on Fridays and you know what? All the clients knew it, they loved the work they produced. The employees were so engaged and super engaged the rest of the week, knowing that on Fridays the phones were turned off, the email was shut down and they could just power away at work.

Now there was an emergency phone number if you’d use something urgently, but for the most part they were shut down. Another one, was a service industry where they dealt with a lot of different, clients and people that represented their product across North America and the world. And they shut down after having a large conference about two weeks after the conference happened because it was all hands on deck and for about seven days in a row. Everybody works super hard. Now you could call it a lieu day, but they actually got lieu time as well. But it was a great way for the organization to say, you know what, we put our people here first and I want to go back to a stat from day one. 69% of your employees are probably this week using your time to look for another job. So are you actually losing anything by closing your doors today and looking at rebuilding or salvaging those employees and bringing them back to being winners and true achievers for the organization? Or are you going to let them continue looking for LinkedIn or are you going to block LinkedIn like that won’t solve anything. They have cell phones. That’s all for this week and this topic. It’s something I’m very passionate about and get. I could go on for hours, but for more on this topic, visit leadingwithnice.com where we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty and get results. Talk to you again next week.